Archive for January, 2008
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 2: Relationship Building
Once you get in the habit of setting up a list for every product you create, the way to get people to remember you is by showing your personality.
I build relationships through forum marketing.
- You could post special offers every now and then by giving visitors of a certain forum a huge discount compared to the general public. I do this with WSOs.
- You could add video responses to posts every now and then and send traffic there so people see your face instead of the words you type. I did this with a YouTube video but I'm not sure if I'm going to post to YouTube on a regular basis because I felt like I was talking about myself too much.
- You could do a low tech link exchange. If someone posts a comment on your blog with their URL, visit their blog and leave a thoughtful comment with your URL.
Use your real name. Any time you join a forum, use your real first and last name. If you plan on pumping out lots of small products you are going to have lots of small web sites and almost never one big web site. The exception could be if you register YourName.com and stick a blog on there with a link to all your products.
Find a forum in your niche that ranks high on the search engines, and make that the only forum you visit for a month. I don't care if there is some forum you are addicted to and have to check every 5 minutes. Take a vacation from that forum and build a reputation on that forum.
I want you to make 50 posts over time on this new forum. They need to be real quality replies that use your expertise on the subject. They need to be answers that could only have come from you.
Never make a "me too" post. Never mention your web site in any reply. Don't start any new topics, just reply to existing ones. Many forums have a link to find posts with no responses... you can reply to these but stay away from any more than a month old.
Once you have these 50 posts, edit your forum profile and add a signature with a link to your web site. Many message boards will require a certain number of posts before you can add a signature anyway.
Only put one link there. Make the text on the link a headline, not just the name of your site. Don't make the text any fancy size or colors, just center if it possible.
Then leave the forum and forget about it. Search engines like Google will pick it up. Now if someone is looking for the solution to one of those specific problems you solved on the forum, they'll find that thread and if you were helpful, might click your signature link and end up on your site. This is in addition to all the members of the forum who visit it on a regular basis.
I have done this with nearly a dozen message boards in my niche. What got me started doing this was checking my referrer logs. Your referrer logs in your control panel will tell you what sites send traffic your way. So someone might ask for help in getting a freebie script of mine customized, or ask if a product I offer is really legit. I register on the forum using my real name, answer the question, then poke around a little while after.
I have even signed up to a $60/month private forum to build relationships based on my referrer logs... but that's just because I'm crazy.
I consider using referrer logs to decide which forums to hit a better indicator than Google search results, because you're already certain traffic is going to flow in your direction.
Top Secret PHP: 300 Sales in 24 Hours
Early yesterday morning (about 24 hours ago) I released yet another PHP video series. This one is called Top Secret PHP.
I launched it using a nickel sale.
What's a nickel sale? Keep reading...
Just so you know what I'm talking about, it's like my other video infoproducts where I supply 7 PHP scripts, provide detailed step-by-step PDF instructions on how they were made, plus a 10-minute-ish video showing it in action, and how you can customize it to fit your site.
It has scripts to run some pretty unique special offers... like fast action bonuses, client-side one time offers, and upsell series.
The rest of the scripts and videos deal with affiliate marketing: how to stop affiliate vendors from stealing your keyword research, how to place pop-ups on other peoples' sites.
It even shows how to tweak your vendor's sales copy to make sometimes very necessary changes (like remove THEIR opt-in forms and ads from sales pages you risked your hard-earned advertising dollars to promote).
Because my most successful product launch (that $3,000 day last June when I announced Web Sites on Crack) was a nickel sale, I decided to go with what works.
A Nickel Sale is Where You Set the Price of Your Product At $0.05.
When someone buys, the price changes to $0.10 and the second buyer has to pay 10 cents for the same product.
Buyer number three has to pay $0.15. And so on.
You wouldn't think it adds up, but it does. I got Web Sites on Crack to run up to the $20 level, which means 400 buyers, so even though people were paying under a dollar at first, the last few people paid $20 for the exact same thing.
With 400 buyers, you average out to about $10 per person or $4000.
Even with just 200 buyers, that's $5 per person on average or $1000 in profit.
An added surprise bonus: That rush of early buyers provides the social proof for others to buy in quickly so THEY don't miss out before the price rises again. It feels like buying a rising stock in the stock market.
Gary Ambrose did this exact same thing with a program called "Nickelmania." I didn't hear about it until a year or so after he did it, after I began doing it.
The difference was with Gary's opp, he offered an affiliate program AND a physical DVD. That is even more ballsy. I'm only offering a downloadable product. If I don't make any money, that's no big deal. But a DVD costs about $5 to have autoshipped. If he gets less than 200 buyers, he loses money.
Then again Gary is all about list building. He is one of those guys who doesn't care about losing a little bit of money because... it's just like AdWords! He's paying for each lead, just like with AdWords you pay for each click to your site, and try to funnel it into a list.
His system is even better than AdWords, because he only pays per lead, not per click, and he's paying for a lead of someone who is willing to give money to him... now he can hit them with a backend product or market to them later down the line.
I've seen Russell Brunson have a site where he PAID affiliates $1 for each newletter sign-up they referred. He doesn't mind the initial loss because he's build a huge list of responsive people.
Even better: pre-qualify subscribers by making them buy something first. I recently saw a site that offered a 1000% commission affiliate program. What he did was charge people 10 cents to sign up to his newsletter, but paid affiliates $1 for each confirmed subscriber. It's the same idea... thinking of it in terms of pay-per-lead.
The moral of the story?
5 cents isn't that cheap, it isn't even a loss after you get a couple hundred sales in.
Here are my sales statistics for Top Secret PHP starting on midnight Thursday January 24th, 2008 and ending on 11:59 PM on that same Thursday...
Number of sales: 298
Profit: $2,179.60
Profit Per Customer: $7.31
Profit after PayPal fees: $2,019.75
Additional sidetracked sales: $124.38
Sure beats the hell out of that slow burning incremental product launch I did with PHP Uncensored, doesn't it? The Top Secret PHP launch just made in a day, what it took PHP Uncensored to two weeks to earn.
P.S. That dimesale / nickelsale script is a part of Sales Page Tactics Volume 3 if you were curious.
PHP Uncensored Version 3
I released the updated "PHP Uncensored" e-book and video package last night, complete with chapter 4.
Some of you were interested in my sales numbers for this launch, I'm going to give them to you. Keep in mind they aren't super great and I never put a lot of work into product launches.
Buyers at $10.00: 168 = $1,680.00
Buyers at $12.50: 28 = $350.00
Buyers at $15.00: 6 = $90.00
(Remember, we want to tally up profits -- not the number of sales.)
Total buyers: 202
Total sales: $2,120.00
After PayPal fees: $1,988.84
No advertising, no JVs, no affiliate programs, just a little bit of good old fashioned lazy forum and list marketing. That means zero expenses for me.
I'm only happy with about $3,000 from a single product launch. Remember that in June I made $3,000 in a single day. I keep telling myself that there are three more chapters to add so maybe things will pick up a bit.
My "Web Sites on Crack" and "PHP on Crack" products sold 405 copies each so I consider that the absolute highest number of buyers I am capable of attracting at this time.
But anyway, back to "PHP Uncensored"...
This latest script in there is a "Link Spy" and shows how to find out what pages on your web site are losing the most visitors.
You get a complete list of what pages on your site your visitors leave from... and which URL they end up going to!
If you can narrow down the links on your site that lose you the most traffic, you could:
- Edit the page and place an opt-in box right before that link to make sure you don't lose visitors permanently.
- Investigate the link and find out if the site you are linking to has an affiliate program you can join.
- Contact the owner of the other site and offer to setup a link exchange.
If an article or page on your site was really really popular... and you plugged that one leak... even one extra sale per week for a year would add up to a nice chunk of change.
Here is the URL to that product so you know what I'm talking about:
www.PHPUncensored.com
Remember that because I'm following that mini product launch plan outlined on my blog earlier this month, every time I add a new chapter, I give free upgrades to existing buyers and then increase the price for new buyers. So the lowest price to get in is right now.
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 1: Funnel Everything Into A List
Any time you offer anything, you need to create a sublist for it. If you have a paid product, create a sublist to put customers into.
If you offer a freebie report, create a sublist for it and require your visitors to opt-in so you can send the download link via e-mail. Don't ask for an e-mail address after they get the product, this works about as poorly as if you sold someone a book and then asked them to pay for it after they're done reading it.
These all need to go to the SAME autoresponder (so you can broadcast a product launch to everyone) but have segmented sublists so you can deliver updates only to some existing buyers, or offer special deals to certain lists.
Do you want to know everything I know about list building?
- Turning existing customers into subscribers gathers the most responsive subscribers.
- Requiring an opt-in in exchange for a free product gathers much less responsive subscribers.
- Trading free information (a newsletter) for an e-mail address gathers even less responsive subscribers.
- Getting subscribers from pay-per-click traffic, co-ops and traffic exchanges gathers subscribers not worth marketing to.
Here is how I broke into the PHP niche: I created a newsletter and offered a free 30-page PDF report in exchange for signing up. This is my "main" sublist. I found some old articles of mine and filled up an autoresponder series with 6 months of follow-ups (1 or 2 messages per week). Most of the time -- especially at the beginning -- I would offer lots of free advice and information. A few weeks into the seriesI mention some of my freebie products to get them on more of my lists. Then I mention some more of my paid products.
Notice how I say "mention." I don't say I switch from articles to promoting my products. I talk about something and then say, "Here is how you solve that problem: (my URL)" or, "If you are interested in that topic, here is more information about it: (my URL)."
Blend content with sales. Too many people try to sell too early or try a hard sell after piling on lots of free info.
About filling up an autoresponder, I tend to do one per week for six months for the main newsletter. For the product sublists, I will space out messages at about one per month.
- First I would ask what they thought of the product, and sent them to a feedback form so I could actually get their response.
- In the next message I would offer a surprise bonus for being a loyal subscriber.
- At some point I would send them to a feedback form again asking for a testimonial and telling them to make sure to include their name and web site URL so they could get some free promotion from my site. (It's always about what's in it for them.)
You don't need to fill up every sublist with an autoresponder sequence because you're going to be pushing your product launches to all sublists every now and then. You also need to remember that many people will be subscribed to more than one of your sublists -- and who wants 5 e-mails a day from the same person? Not me.
You do need people to remember who you are and that's what we'll deal with next: relationship building.
Financial Goals
What do you do with the leftover internet marketing money you have laying around?
The easy answer is, reinvest it back into your business. That doesn't work for me because I very rarely do any outsourcing or advertising.
Okay, so what about financial goals? I already own a car, there are no specific places I want to travel.
I want a house. Actually I want a condo... I don't want to have to deal with keeping up a yard or mowing the lawn or any of that stuff.
With a 30-year fixed mortgage at 8%, I could get a $100,000 loan for equal to the same rent I pay now, living in a 2-story townhouse, with no roommates. Okay great you say, what homes in California sell for that much?
There are condos down the street slightly larger than my apartment... PLUS a garage... that sold for $250k this summer... that are now $160k. If I can put $50k down, my monthly mortgage payment on that thing would be close enough to the rent I'm paying now for me to be happy.
So how have I been doing? Since buying my car with all cash in June (I should have had it financed... but that's another story) I added $20k over time into a stock brokerage account.
With a little bit of work and a LOT of aggravation I built that up into $30k by December. I learned a lot along the way. I avoided so many of the usual stock trading newbie mistakes.
It was way too emotionally taxing to gain $1000 in the morning on some days only for the gains for the day to go back down to $0 by the end of the day. I would check several times daily, sometimes every 5 minutes.
What I learned quickly is that I was creating another job for myself. It wasn't even a fun job. Either I gained some money and started worrying about losing it, or I lost money and worried about how I was going to get it back.
I was a freaking full-time gambler and I didn't even realize it. So where do you stick your leftover money?
- Figure out a way to reinvest it back into your business. You need to find some way.
- Put it in a savings account and slightly beat inflation.
- Put it in a CD for a 4% yearly return.
- Invest it in an index fund or money market account for a 5% return.
I no longer daytrade.
Whatever you do, don't create extra work for yourself. Don't create an extra job. Your time is way more important than any amount of money.
What are your financial goals? (Seriously, post here and share them with me.)
What do you do specifically to reinvest your profits back into your business?
Would you still pursue internet marketing and create products for fun if you had all the money in the world?
Practice
Previously when I was talking about product creation I said the three ways to get infoproducts produced quickly are: don't make it look good, get excited about the topic, and practice.
This last Sunday (January 13th, 2008) I took my girlfriend to the Arco Arena stadium in Sacramento and attended an open-to-the-public Sacramento Kings basketball practice session.
(Don't I look oh-so-entertained?)
Everyone benefits from practice -- not just professional sports players. You benefit from practice every day of your life, from driving a car to brushing your teeth, to writing that e-book and recording video.
Practice means you get used to a routine and can focus your creativity on things that really matter.
You automate the hard part -- getting the ideas down on a page -- and can think about cool homework assignments to add to your books, better headlines, or fun ways to market the product to your list.
My older sister graduated from college a few years ago with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a minor in Journalism. She had to write a lot of papers. When she still lived with our parents, I would visit sometimes and see her working on a paper at the computer.
I noticed a few things about her at the computer:
- Sometimes she would "warm up" for a paper by quickwriting. She would open up a blank Word document and start typing anything that came to mind just to get her into the rhythm for a few minutes, then start on the actual paper.
- She kept a blog for fun. This was a private blog and obviously I never read it, but she would write pages and pages on that thing. Keeping a blog gets you used to writing.
- She would wait until the last minute to write the paper. Usually the night before. She was a great student but was unable to work on a paper ahead of time... her brain wasn't trained for it. Her brain was trained to write under pressure with a time constraint. If you ask me that's the best way to write because it means you get the most work done in the least amount of time.
The books I write -- you can check any of them out on the sidebar of this blog -- are filled with dumb little jokes and puns. Most of the time I don't realize I've written them until they're already typed out. Because I'm not really thinking about what I'm typing, the final result is funnier, more story-like, and more interesting.
Even ignoring all the creative benefits of practice, when you make a routine, the process is easier and repeatable. This doesn't just apply to the creation of your product -- it applies to the promotion of it too.
Once my product is finished, I'm so used to writing the sales letter, writing the ad, posting the WSO, sending an e-mail out to my list... that I get a weird unsettling feeling if I don't do all that stuff right away.
I use my own PHP scripts to setup these sites quickly, for example, the scripts I offer at www.SalesPageTactics.com to do things like add a contact form, make my site more interactive, or setup a countdown timer to increase urgency.
When you get used to releasing smaller imperfect products over and over, you will cut down on your launch time with each release and have time for more "fun."
You'll get more excited and as a result have a more creative finished product with lots of flow.
Most importantly, you'll actually have something out there selling and making a little bit of money so you can move on to creating the next product and setting up a new income stream.
Get Excited About Your Topic
You can write down a lot of information at a time by getting excited about your topic. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself and think back to high school when you had to write some stupid 5 page essay and it was a struggle just to finish a paragraph. It's easy to give up and say you're "not a writer."
Ask yourself:
- Have you ever stayed up all night talking with a best friend or significant other?
- Have you kept a diary?
- Have you had a phone conversation that lasted longer than an hour?
- Have you described every little detail of some amazing movie you really liked?
I bet your answer is YES to all of these questions.
Why is it hard to write a term paper but easy to write a blog or post a zillion MySpace comments? Because a term paper is "work" and blogging is "fun." If you are in a niche that also happens to be your favorite hobby, writing gets a lot easier.
When I write a book, it takes me around two hours for a 5-10 page article. If it's a book on PHP then this includes the time to write the PHP script. If the book includes video, it takes me about 15 minutes to record the demonstration video for each chapter. I almost always get the videos recorded in one take... that's just because of practice. I'm a horrible public speaker and always will be, but I show that I'm excited about the topic and know what I'm talking about.
The same thing goes with writing. Have you seen my writing? I'm sloppy, I don't use fancy language and I try to put as few sentences possible into paragraphs.
I wouldn't have it any other way. If you learn to write the same way you speak, your writing will have a strong voice and you will be able to write everything quickly.
I try to write with 5% or less passive sentences.
I try to write at a 4th or 5th grade reading level.
I feel guilty writing sentences longer than 7 words.
The downside is that everything you write kind of smells like a first draft, but then again if you go back and edit your writing, you won't find anything particularly horrible, plus your writing will be packed with more ideas than the average writer.
Getting Excited = Less Work + Stronger Voice + Higher Idea-to-Paragraph Ratio.
- Instead of writing a big long paragraph explaining a series of ideas, make a bullet-point list of 3-4 items.
- Bold the important words but don't get carried away.
- Never say more than you have to.
Every now and then I like to read a little bit about copywriting. Copywriting doesn't interest me all that much, but I want to write in a way that keeps attention to the very end, and has a clear call-to-action at the end.
Headlines, stories, mysteries, cliffhangers, lists... these are much more interesting than topic sentence... concrete detail... concluding sentence... and then onto the next boring paragraph.
You need to be passionate about your topic. If you are excited about it then it will show and get your readers / customers / prospects excited about what you have to say.
It Doesn’t Have to Look Good, Just Be Good
I only have three tips for fast infoproduct creation:
- Don't make it look good.
- Get excited about your topic.
- Practice.
John Williams made an excellent point to last Wednesday's blog post... which was about writing a small report and adding onto it later, releasing free upgrades to existing customers while increasing the price to new buyers as the size of the infoproduct went up. John said that I left out the part about doing the actual work, writing the e-book itself.
It has never taken me longer than 7 working days to create an infoproduct. By "infoproduct" I mean a 100 to 150 page e-book. A few years ago I created a package where I sold 3 e-books in one, that was a one month project.
One week to write each of the three e-books and I spent the final week writing a bunch of articles to promote the book so I could post one article to article sites every day or so.Your product doesn't have to look super great and fancy. It doesn't even have to look okay.
I heard a story once about a guy who ordered a DVD from a web site about how to play the guitar. The DVD was homemade, burned on a store-bought DVD-R with the title of the DVD handwritten with a sharpie marker on the disc.
The buyer popped the DVD into his DVD player. There was no menu, the video just started up and was a low quality camcorder video of a guy warming up on his guitar. The camerawoman (his wife) was fiddling with the focus and zoom and asking if it was recording.
Edit: Paydex pointed out that the story was from Russell Brunson about some weightlifting DVDs he ordered - thanks - it's been bugging me for years where that story came from.
The creator of the product didn't bother to edit any of this out. Heck, maybe he didn't even know how!
It didn't matter. The buyer was more than happy with the lessons the DVD had to offer. The presentation doesn't matter as much as you think. Ken Evoy heavily tested graphics versus no graphics on his sales letters... guess what... graphics hardly made any difference.
In fact, fancy graphics and Flash can hurt your sales letter conversion rates if they are too large and distract readers from your headline and sales copy. Just present your information in a simple and readable way.
Would you rather create a product that has a nice looking box with crappy content, or a crappy box with great content?
Please, do everyone a favor and get your product out there even if it isn't 100% polished.
PHP Uncensored
The entry about product creation that I was going to post today will have to wait until Monday. That's because I just launched a new PHP video package and it's called PHP Uncensored.
But there's a little bit of a twist to it. I'm following the mini-product launch formula we talked about earlier this week. Usually my PHP video packages contain: 7 scripts, 7 chapters of an e-book, and 7 videos. Retail price after all the specials are over: around $20-$30.
Video 1: How To Bully Your Web Visitors To Buy When You Show How Many Copies Of A Product Are Remaining! (5 minutes 44 seconds)
Shocking but clever Internet marketing technique exposed: Who ever thought to combine a countdown timer with a popup?
Video 2: Automatically Keep Your Headlines Current And Up To Date In A Way That Evokes Familiarity From Your Readers! (10 minutes 4 seconds)
Tune-up the existing headlines on your site by making sure they always refer to current (or upcoming) events -- your sales copy will never require maintenance!
Videos 3 through 7 are currently CENSORED!! You don't know what's coming, but I know what's coming, and I'm telling you these are some damn cool unique and really useful scripts in the pipeline.
With PHP Uncensored, you get the first 2 scripts, chapters, and videos for $10 because that's all I've made so far. Actually that's half true, if you are on my mailing list and read my e-mails I have had two full books written (complete with scripts) but I didn't make the videos.
In a couple of days I'm going to release the third chapter and bump up the price to $12.50. Then a few days later, I'll put out the fourth chapter and bump up the price to $15.00 ... and so on, $2.50 each time, until all 7 chapters are available.
I'm offering free upgrades with this. That means when I release chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, and so on, you get all those updated versions as they come out. It's your choice... you can pay $10 now and get the same thing or wait a few days and pay as much as $22.50.
Here's that link one more time: http://www.phpuncensored.com ...
Is It Possible to Make $5000 Per Month Writing Articles?
If you have big huge grandiose plans for your product launch, it's never going to get launched.
Here is what I would do instead...
Write a simple report. It doesn't have to be big, just 10 to 20 pages. Write a quick one-page sales letter for it because... it's only a report, right? Then launch it, price it at $7 or $10.
Limit the special offer to just 10 buyers. After 10 sales, snap it shut and close the offer. Now you have $100 in your pocket for writing this report... great, right? But it's not the big huge product launch you hoped for.
That same afternoon, write the next chapter in the e-book. E-mail it out to all your buyers for free (if you were really evil you could charge $1 for the upgrade... but I'd rather not have to try and juggle multiple versions of the same book). Then post another special offer with the upgrade book for $11... again, limiting it to 10 buyers.
These will be 10 new buyers you can add to your list. (Make sure you are funneling all these sales into a product update list... otherwise this strategy is totally useless.) Repeat the process. That afternoon, write another chapter, add a couple bullet points to the sales letter, mail out the free upgrade and then post the offer for $12.
If you do this until you have a 50-page report (let's say 10 chapters in addition to the original report)... that's:
$100 + $110 + $120 + $130 + $140 + $150 + $160 + $170 + $180 + $190 + $200...
Which equals: $1,650. But more importantly, it equals 110 proven buyers, and you can expect a good number of those to buy from you again if you come out with similar reports for that same niche in the future.
If you could write just one "article" (I like to call my chapters "articles" ... it makes them easier to write) per day for a month, that means you launched three reports and accumulated 330 buyers (some duplicates... let's say 200) for a profit of $5000.
You don't even have to write every single day. If you were ambitious and could pump out 5 articles in one day, you could take the rest of the week off... aside from 10 minutes a day posting the special offer and dealing with customer support.
Continue this for six months, and you don't have to do these incremental launches anymore... your list will be big enough that you can write a report, launch it, send an e-mail, and take orders.
June 2007 was my best month and I didn't do any sort of AdWords, joint ventures, article marketing, social networking, nothing. I made a product, posted on a forum, then e-mailed my list of 8000 people (mostly previous buyers... because they are the most responsive!)
If you are the kind of person interested in totals, I only launched 3 e-books that month... 7 chapters, each chapter had a video, they were about 50 page reports with 60-90 minutes of video. The book part took a week of writing one article-chapter per day and a grand total of two hours making the videos.
On June 19th, 2007, I made 362 sales totalling $3,058.72 ($2,850.02 after fees). The total PayPal sales for that whole month and the three products I launched was 978 sales totalling $11,420.30... $10,541.05 after fees and a couple refunds. That plus my Clickbank accounts and day job income totalled right about $15,000 income for one month... not bad for a 22 year old! (I was 22 in June... now I am 23.)
